Find the right motherboard for your ITX NAS build.
Find the right motherboard for your ITX NAS build.
Good evening, I'm working on setting up an ITX NAS and currently facing a tough choice between two motherboards. I need advice from the community to help me decide. I have two options: AsRock X570 Phantom Gaming-ITX/TB3 and Asus B550-I Strix. For the X570, the main advantage is Thunderbolt 3 support and an x570 chipset—everything else seems standard. It comes with a single M.2 slot, 1GB LAN, Wi-Fi 6, but it lacks AM4 coolers because this board uses a 115X CPU cooler layout from the factory. The Asus board doesn’t have Thunderbolt 3, but it offers 2.5GB LAN, Wi-Fi 6, dual M.2 slots, and supports AM4 coolers. My NAS will run TrueNAS Scale with a Ryzen 5 5600G, 64GB DDR4 3600MHz RAM, 70TB HDD, 512GB SSD (for the OS), 32GB Optane NVMe for ZFS cache, and a PCI-E 4x6 SATA HBA. I’m upgrading from my old Jonsbo N1 case and want something reliable. Any recommendations or insights would be greatly appreciated!